November is always a fun time in college basketball as some of the nation’s top teams fly around the country playing in holiday tournaments that put together matchups you’d rarely see otherwise.

The best early season event this year? The Champions Classic, which will feature Duke and Jabari Parker against Kansas and Andrew Wiggins as the undercard to Michigan State and Kentucky, which could end up being No. 1 vs. No. 2.

On the fifth day of the season.

That’ll be awesome, and you better believe that Tom Izzo and his Spartans are looking forward to the challenge. According to a student in attendance at Michigan State’s Midnight Madness, Izzo dropped this gem: “We are working to kick Kentucky’s [rear end].”

Well, word got back to John Calipari about this, and two times over the course of the last four days, Cal has managed to reference that quote.

Our third game is against Michigan State. That’s going to be hard. They’re already a veteran team. They’ve already made comments that their practices are about beating Kentucky. But I say this to you: If I ask my team when we play Florida, they’re not going to know. North Carolina, (they don’t know). I’m going to do it today, because as I thought about it, they don’t know. You think they know when we’re playing Louisville? They don’t know. They want to know if there is a meal tonight. They don’t know. Now, I ask you this: Does everyone on our schedule know when they’re playing Kentucky? Oh, they know. And it’s on their locker, it’s on their ceiling of their bedroom. You’ve got to deal with that. That’s part of being at Kentucky. You know what I tell them? Not only do they want to beat Kentucky, they want to beat you as individual player. You want to know why? They wanted that scholarship that you got and they want to prove they’re better than you, not just their team is better than Kentucky. So that’s the challenge that we have. But would you want it any other way? I don’t. Bring it. Let’s go.

Izzo and Cal get along, and most of this is good-natured back-and-forth between a couple of competitors.

But I’ll tell you what, no one can spin the way that Coach Cal can spin: “Oh, you’re biggest game of the year is against us? Well guess what. We’re trying to go undefeated, so EVERY game we play is our biggest game of the year. Because we’re so much more awesome than you.”